Google Authenticator

Posted on July 9, 2013 by bluedepth

Over the long Fourth of July holiday weekend I received an email from WordPress.com detailing news that they were now fully compatible with the Google Authenticator Two-Factor security system. I haven’t thought of Two-Factor in a long while and decided to look into how Google had cornered the market in this particular security market.

First a little background. The term Two-Factor security means that when you want to prove who you are to some service, called authentication, you usually just have to present two pieces of information, a username and a password. This combination not only identifies who you are and proves your identity through the shared secret of the password, but allows systems to remain as open as possible to all clients who want to connect – assuming that everyone is playing by the rules and nobody is trying to be sneaky or clever. Passwords are notoriously wimpy things, most people give up on complexity because they can’t readily remember the password and it’s not convenient so they select simple passwords like “12345”, “password”, or “secret” and leave it at that. The problem with passwords is that people who make them up are either lazy or don’t care about entropy or complexity and since a lot of your work and identity is being controlled using these systems, using these simple passwords is begging for disaster. Another issue that plagues a lot of people, and goes in with how naturally lazy many of us are, is that people will use one poor password on every site they go to and keep their usernames the same as well. The risk here is that when one service is compromised, all the other services are compromised as well and it’s a huge upward climb to get out of that mess if you find yourself trapped in it.

Cleverness works both against people in general, with thieves, phishers, and hackers as well as for people in general, with things like hashapass or applications like 1Password. Hashapass is a free service that combines the web address of a service with one single complicated password to generate a hash, which is to say, a value that is easily calculated from the combination of the single complicated password and the web address but done so in a way that going backwards is very difficult to do. If any piece of the puzzle is missing, it’s technically unsolvable. As an alternative to this there is 1Password, an application that I have become very fond of, and it uses a similar approach to hashapass. In 1Password one master password unlocks a database of all the sites and their individual passwords so you don’t have to remember a constellation of passwords, all you need is to remember one very good secure password and you are all set. There are a few other nice features to 1Password that I like, being able to generate very long random passwords and store them for me allows me to establish plausible deniability when it comes to my online identities. Because 1Password randomly selected a 32-character password for Facebook, I cannot be compelled, even under torture to reveal that password to anyone else. I just don’t know it. I know 1Password, but that’s not the right question so my account remains secure.

All of this I have collected and use, and I use it everywhere. On my MacBook Pro, my iMac at work, my iPad and my iPhone. 1Password makes it very easy to manage the security database and I’m quite sure that it’s secure. In my life, any more security is rather like putting more padlocks on a firmly locked jail cell, it’s rather silly and feels a lot like overkill. Then again, more security is always better, especially if it’s really clever and somewhat convenient.

Two-Factor security adds another component to the process of authentication. It augments the username and password combination. A password is something I know (or store using 1Password) and the second factor is something called a Time-Based One Time Password (TOTP). This is where the free iPhone app called Google Authenticator comes in. The app records a secret key from a site I wish to prove my identity to in the future, for example, Google itself. I set up two-factor, request a security token for Google Authenticator and set it up in the app. The key is transmitted by QR code, which means you can quickly acquire the long complicated random (hard to type) secret key using the camera in your phone. Once this process is complete the Google Authenticator app displays a six digit number that will work to prove your identity to the site associated with that particular entry and this entry only exists for 30 seconds at a time. This six digit password exists only once in any one 30-second period and there is no way to divine this password without having the Google Authenticator application with it’s stored secret code.

Having two-factor enabled in this way means that my username and password are no longer as important as they once were. Even if my username and password are revealed or compromised without my knowledge, the secret key that I have in my Google Authenticator app remains secure with me and the 30-second-long one-time-password additions remain a secret with me. What I know may be compromised, but what I have (the Google Authenticator) most likely won’t be unless someone steals my phone and finds a way to best the security on that device before I have a chance to wipe it remotely. If in the case my Google Authenticator becomes compromised, my passwords will likely not be because they are uncrackable, and so I am still secure.

Practically how does this work? When I want to log into Google Mail using two-factor, this is what I do. I open a web browser, I type in the address “gmail.com” and press enter. Then I enter my username and my password and then in the third field under the password is a box labeled “Google Authenticator Token” and then I grab my phone, start my Google Authenticator application and then read the six-digit number from my phone and type it in. The service logs me right on and after a few seconds, that six-digit password is no longer valid and is meaningless. I’m authenticated and the system did as it was designed to do. One of the nice parts of Google Authenticator is that the entire app is a mathematical operation, it doesn’t require the network at all to generate these numbers, so this would be a good solution for people who may not have a reliable connection to the network or have a data quota on their phone.

Of course, online authentication is just the beginning. I found a way, yesterday, to embed the Google Authenticator system into my Mac OSX Mountain Lion installation so that when I want to login to my computer at work or my laptop I have to type in my username, my password, and read the six-digit code from my Google Authenticator application. The setup isn’t difficult to get it to work. You need a compiled PAM module which I have (just ask if you want a copy) and an application which you use to create the secret key on your computer. With it all set up, and a slight adjustment to a settings file, even if I were to lose security on my password at work nobody could login to my account without my username, password, and GA token.

This arrangement works quite well and I’ve set it up for my Google accounts, my WordPress.com and .org blogs, Facebook, Evernote, and Dropbox accounts as well. Everything is secure, obnoxiously secure. 🙂

photo by: MoneyBlogNewz

Tent Flapping

Posted on March 12, 2013 by bluedepth

Went back and forth just now on IntenseDebate plugin for WordPress.org. I thought it might be useful and add some features to my blog that would be nice to have, like After-The-Deadline plugin for comments and such. Everything was going well until I noticed that my Akismet Spam queue was at 74 comments. I tried to open the queue and couldn’t as IntenseDebate had replaced that part of my blog with its own controls. So, with no way to look at my Akismet Spam queue I decided that the pros for the IntenseDebate plugin couldn’t compensate for the way it broke my blog when it came to Akismet Spam queue access. So, there was for a brief time a new comment system, and then there wasn’t.

Which doesn’t mean a lot because people aren’t actually commenting on my blog, they are commenting on Facebook. I do get the one-off Twitter retweet or favorite, but that’s it.

PAD 3/1/2013 – Back to the Future

Posted on March 9, 2013 by bluedepth

A service has been invented through which you can send messages to people in the future. To whom would you send something, and what would you write?

A service that is oddly identical to a time capsule? This already exists and we’ve seen what people in the past thought we’d like to see in “the future” and it turns out to be the same kind of junk we have now, only older. Even when reading science fiction the authors are either so lazy as to assume nothing happens (leisure suits in the 26th century huh?) all the way to 2010, when we have a manned mission to Jupiter. The truth of the matter is that the things we were promised from images of what the future would hold didn’t matter once we had them. We never developed jet packs because we didn’t need them. We were promised videophones and then when they became trivial nobody cared enough to use them.

Most of this is meaningless. The only thing I would make an exception for is personal journalling. It’s a private time capsule to yourself in the future and that I will say is worth its weight in gold. Writing down your thoughts makes them solid, makes them things that years later you can open up and bask in how things were before. With the words you don’t have to struggle to reconstruct some time a million and a half hours ago, they are right there in black and white, just waiting for you. I think everyone should keep a personal journal of what they think as they go along their lives. The only thing I regret is not journaling sooner.

In a way, Twitter, Facebook, WordPress blogs and my Day One Journal are the very devices that I will use to send a message to the future. A future me. A future me who has forgotten much of what living in this time was like. I will, years from now, look at these entries and marvel about how simple things were, how limited we were, I’m sure there will be a lot of marvelous and terrible events between now and then. In the in-between this entry will persist, these words – written down – along with all the others, biding their time. In a certain way if you think about it, journalling is the most reliable way to pin your life in time. It’s a bid for immortality, you may be fleeting, but your words don’t have to be. In fact, your words could last forever if cared for properly. Look at the Code of Hammurabi. It lasted for 3785 years! The idea that our tweets and our blogs and our little journals could last that long or even longer takes my breath away.

Do yourself a favor. Start blogging. Start journaling. Find some way to record your story and get it done yesterday. Write as much as you can, because when time and disability strike it will be the word-shaped life-preservers that help you to keep your grip on who you are when you need them the most.

Drafts Changes Workflow

Posted on March 9, 2013 by bluedepth

The more I use the Drafts app for my iPad and iPhone the more I love it and the more I want to use it. It’s actually changed the workflow for my “Post-a-Day” WordPress blogging as well as my regular blogging in general. What I used to do was copy the Post-a-Day prompt emails over to my WordPress blog and set the post type to Drafts and let them sit there. I’ve never been a huge fan of the editor built-in to WordPress, but copying the emails to Drafts and storing them there, syncing them to Simperium which then synchronizes them across all my devices that have Drafts loaded on them, which is now just my iPhone.

The app itself has so many neat features, being able to store multiple drafts and have them swipe-accessible from the left makes switching files a breeze and then when the post is done and ready to be published I can swipe from the right and select as many services as I want to send my drafts off to. It’s the perfect promontory to launch Day One, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and WordPress. Generally speaking, the drafts themselves almost always follow a certain path, first to Day One then to WordPress because then WordPress sends links to Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr on my behalf with the publicize feature. But sometimes I write things that don’t go to my blog, in that case I can send to Day One and Facebook. I have configured the apps representation in Facebook to conform to my “Sharing” security group, so even if I tap the Facebook option I don’t have to worry about my private sharing thoughts leaking out where they don’t belong.

The only thing (yes, there is one of these for every user) that I would really love is a Drafts app for Mac OSX. That would let me hack away on Drafts entries on my iMac without having to clear off workplace desktop space to set up my iPad. I think it’ll just be a matter of time before we see those options start to become available. I would pay $15 for an app like that without even batting an eye.

Friday Flashback – March 8th

Posted on March 8, 2013 by bluedepth

2004 – I got my IRS return back from the Feds, $1700, a part of that went to GenCon. Boy, were those the days. Since GenCon went to Indianapolis, and I don’t travel through Indiana unless driven by a myrddraal, that won’t be happening again. Some funny Andy-abuses-popsong-lyrics humor and the almost daily work issues, which at this point are at the focus where irritation and cliché meet. Moving along…

2006 – The big thing on this day was Project Runway was concluded. The most important bit from this show happened this year, “Where’s Andre?” Yes. Where.

2007 – Owning an American Made Car made the headlines on this day. Getting screwed over by General Motors makes 2013 a laugh-fest. We saved GM, Quist-ler, and Ford. Oh hooray. $1200 for replacement bearings and fourth set of brakes. It’s one of the reasons why I’ll never own another American made piece of shit car again. American auto companies can fail – hah – or not. wry smile The start of my debt was this awful car, one small little golden brick of it at least.

2009 – The beginning of the end for my odd benign cyst that was on my leg for years and years and years. This was when that whole thing started on the path to the end. Now I’m delightfully symmetrical and ever so daintily scarred. In the movies? Watchmen. Those were the days.

2010 – Wireless carriers still mattered. Sprint was good for highways, Verizon was slow but everywhere and AT&T was shit. This also was when AT&T bought Centennial wireless. So, whatever. Little did these carriers know but they were on the path to becoming commodity carriers. Nobody cares about their products or their employees, just their towers. In other news, I was hopeful that La Palma would break off, hit the ocean and several hours later erase New York City with a megatsunami. Alas, my hopes were for naught. New York City still exists. Blah. I started to blog and lauded how I could link dump automatically on Twitter and Facebook. Yeah, social networks as whores, take it bitches. It was at this point I realized that Apple Sales are whores. If you approach them and jingle money at them, they’ll do anything for you, but after the sale? You’re full of Santorum and the beer goggles have worn off. I also wished for Fax Machines to disappear. I didn’t get my wish.

2011 – A bit of Sage love as an email brought me great joy. I still thought Daniel Tosh was pretty neat, before the rape jokes and general wretchedness set in. WMU rolled out the Bronco Transit Mobile GPS and I thought it was neat, then I stopped using the system. I started thinking about how awkward it must be for Christians when Easter isn’t a fixed date but based off a calculation on the moon after the vernal equinox, lulz. Extra special work-fun and I started talking about AES–256 and how smart people look it up and take advantage of it.

2013 – Reality TV and Contest TV kind of suck. I decided to make a change to what I do at home, after dinner and cleanup are done. A very old friend and I shared a special moment, but they have no idea because it was just a dream. My daily tarot card readings pretty much jive with my horoscopes and so, I do my best to not go all “Hulk Angry/Hulk Smash”. I dealt with work issues, did things I’m not proud of, found FBackup which was okay, and generally felt that the day was best forgotten. I laughed heartily at the foibles of folken, they don’t, so I do, and it doesn’t matter. Well, it matters to me, which is why I do it. What is it? Ah, yes. Work stuff… you’ll never be knowing. Trust Issues. Dangly Bits. LOL.

Help Yourself

Posted on February 26, 2013 by bluedepth

I have to admit to really enjoying the web service IFTTT. The service stands for If This, Then That. It allows you to create recipes from a menu of popular services where there is a public API available and move data back and forth not according to anyones design but your own, with IFTTT’s help, of course.

A great practical example is Twitter. On Twitter there is an account, MichiganDOT that is the public twitter mouthpiece for Michigan’s Department of Transportation, those folks responsible for the roads and rails and such. This twitter resource is valuable for many reasons the least of which is that MichiganDOT tweets about road hazard conditions and the presence of crashes or construction that would otherwise hamper movement within the Mitten. On its own Twitter is something that you have to grope for, you’ve got to start an app and page around to find what you are after and it’s all very manual — and annoying. I hate annoying. So how can you beat MichiganDOT, for example, into a service that sends you alerts? IFTTT.

The recipe in IFTTT to make this work is clever if you know the way to run around the back-end of Twitter. Several months ago Twitter closed their API to IFTTT making it difficult to create any new IFTTT recipes that use Twitter data to do automatic things. Twitter left a back door open, in that every Twitter account has an undocumented RSS feed associated with it, and all you need to know is the trick to get at it. IFTTT can consume RSS data, Twitter produces RSS data, so it’s kismet. The code you start with is this:

http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=michigandot

This plugs into IFTTT’s Feed source, then you connect that to IFTTT’s SMS destination, set it to your mobile phone number and the recipe is done! Just like that. Really easy and straightforward and now the very moment that anyone who staffs the MichiganDOT twitter account posts ANYTHING the RSS link lights up, IFTTT notices, copies it over to an SMS message and ships it out to my phone.

With the undocumented API backdoor from Twitter, MichiganDOT, and IFTTT I am able to recast the MichiganDOT twitter account as a “Michigan Road Conditions Alert Line” and I don’t need to sign up for anything or ask anyone for anything or cajole some developer to make something to make it work for me. In many ways, it is a clever way to have my cake and eat it too. I don’t have to schlep around in Twitter missing things, I get alerts, bam, as they happen.

The nice thing about IFTTT is it’s just the tip of the iceberg. You can send any channel data anywhere you want. Twitter to Evernote, Twitter to Pocket, Facebook to Evernote, Facebook to Pocket… there are about 20 channels you can fiddle around with and you can shop around for other people’s recipes and adopt them and make them work for you. If you don’t have IFTTT, then you are missing out on a huge potential of DIY convenience. The best part is, nobody is the wiser. MichiganDOT has no notion, Twitter doesn’t care, so why not use what’s out there and make it work for you?

Empty Nests

Posted on February 22, 2013 by bluedepth

I’ve given up on Twitter. I won’t be removing my account as Twitter still has some use to for browsing the stream but there really isn’t any compelling interactions on that service for me any longer. The only things that will end up on Twitter really are links to blog posts and maybe the one-off comment.

Ever since Twitter enabled the data download feature on my account, I took advantage of it. I downloaded the entire archive and discovered to my pleasure that Twitter stored all my tweets as plain text in a CSV file. I spent the last months migrating my old Tweets into my Day One application. I will hand one thing to Twitter, it did keep me “logging” along for a long time. I’m switching that impulse over to Day One. It’s impressive just how much of my past I have recorded. It turns out to be about 2600 days, or about 7 years of my past – recorded and in some ways with a lot of resolution. For that I will always be thankful for Twitter. However…

The reason why I am leaving Twitter is because it is too exposed. I didn’t feel it was useful to have a private Twitter account, so I left it public and this decision was made with a devil-may-care attitude, that anything I tweeted wouldn’t matter. As it turns out, it does. Mostly this is because of my workplace, in that I do not trust them or anyone who works there. It’s not really anything meant to be hurtful or anything, but I can’t risk my job and I certainly feel that sharing on Twitter threatens my employment. For as far as I trust Western Michigan University, it starts and ends with the partitioned, compartmentalized version of me that works there professionally. Not the true honest authentic me. Being honest and sharing freely would just upset everyone and lead to needless drama at work, so I unfollowed a bunch of coworkers and people whose tweets would have gone to waste on an ignored account.

Another problem with Twitter is the loss of engagement and dimensionality. Everyone on Twitter is a three-dimensional person with all the complexities that come with being alive. Twitter’s relationships seem stuck in a one-sided mode of conversation. This very thing struck me most powerfully as I was migrating Tweets into my Day One app. I caught out of the corner of my eye tweets that I had made to people who were popular or famous. They were wasted messages. At first this concerned me, but then I realized that what was really going on was that the people who had thousands and thousands of followers were so far beyond their social horizon (that 150 limit I’ve written about before) that they simply cannot socially relate to anyone beyond their subset coterie of social contacts. It’s not that they are mean or being ignorant, but they just cannot process that level of interaction – it’s more about how our biology is colliding with our technology. So for the really famous, the really popular, that’s where the dimensionality comes in. A regular person is three-dimensional. The others are one-dimensional. They are human billboards. They stand there and output information and you stop thinking of them as individuals and start relating to them as “sources” instead. Robbing them of their inherent humanity. They don’t have feelings, as billboards don’t have feelings.

So, we’re all done with that. Twitter will still be a link-dump for my blog. Most of my actual sharing will start in Byword, then be copied to Day One, then from there shared to Facebook under my “Sharing” security model. If you don’t see lots of things on my Facebook wall, that’s because you aren’t in “Sharing”, and mostly that’s because I can’t allow my honest self to interfere with my work. — Gosh, writing that out felt wrong, but at least I’m honest.

If you follow me on Twitter and want to keep your lists tidy and unfollow me, I won’t even notice you leaving. So go in peace.

Sharing

Posted on December 21, 2012 by bluedepth

I ran into an inconvenience with the current way I share socially
online. I have established a new workflow. Short messages still end up
going to Twitter, and if I feel like they are worth sending to Facebook
I use “Selective Tweets” to push that single tweet forward into
Facebook. For longer entires I write them up in Day One no matter if
they are public or private and then save them there and then share them
via email if they are public with my WordPress blog. If they are private
matters, they simply get shared with Facebook with a default stringent
security setting so only the right people can see those posts.

The email routine actually has been hit and miss to start but now it’s
working out quite nicely. First I migrated my blog from WordPress.com to
Wordpress.org. This is just me moving stuff from a companies site (.com)
to the domain that I own with Scott (windchilde.com) and I figure since
I’m paying for it anyways I might as well use it. Plus the switch over
to the windchilde.com domain also allows me unlimited storage and
unlimited bandwidth so I can share photos and videos without having to
worry about running into any storage caps or having to pay for extra
storage when I’m already paying for a pretty good deal with the host
that runs windchilde.com. I originally started with WordPress.org and
figured that Jetpack, which is a feature crosstalk package between
Wordpress.com and WordPress.org, extending some of the things that I
liked about WordPress.com around my installation of WordPress.org for
free. One of those options was “Post by Email” which gave me a
gobbledegook address at post.wordpress.com. That feature never worked
for me. It was supposed to be turn-key but it fell on it’s face. So I
turned to plugins, which are how you can extend WordPress.org sites, but
not WordPress.com sites. The company keeps a tight lid on things like
that where the “DIY” system is far more flexible and accommodating. I
downloaded the plugin called “Postie” and configured it to use a POP
account that I created on the windchilde.com domain and got that all set
up. There were a wee bit of growing pains regarding how to set
Categories and Tags in the email posts that I was making out of Day One.
What I had was a rather clunky Evernote note with the copied text from
my WordPress Category page so I could refer to that to pick and choose
which category I wanted the email post to go into. This was a mess. I
thought about it for a while and when I was done working out at Anytime
Fitness it struck me in a eureka moment; Why not just use TextExpander
to do the heavy lifting? So I started TextExpander on my MBP at home and
it came up, loaded the settings from my Dropbox (neat) and I created a
new snippet, called it “Categories” and set it’s trigger to be “;cat”.
Then I loaded all my categories from WordPress into a bracketed
pull-down list that TextExpander enables you to make on-the-fly so once
I’m done with Day One editing, I can save the entry (also is stored in
my Dropbox, yay!) and then click Share, Email, and then with the open
email I can just type in the trigger for each category I want to add and
I don’t need to remember to go to Evernote to get the list, or risk a
typo screwing everything up. Using Categories this way is really
convenient and tags are a snap to add as well.

Every once in a while I like to plug software that really works for me.
I plug the tarnations out of Mac, of course, as it’s the platform that I
can actually get my work done on. The apps that run on the Mac make the
rest of it work oh-so-well. Day One is a magnificent personal journaling
app. It’s private and password protected on all my devices and stored on
my Dropbox so I don’t have to screw around with backups or restores or
worrying that my entire Journal may just flit off into nothingness if my
MBP or a flash drive decides to play dumb on me. Plus Day One has
in-built sharing features, so I can share via Email, Twitter, or
Facebook if I want to. WordPress.org is not really software that runs on
my Mac, but instead runs on a host. The host I use is iPage.com and they
do a competent job. Setting up a WordPress.org site is embarrassingly
easy, mostly just a handful of clicks and you get a starter email with
the address you should use and your username and a temporary password. I
started to use WordPress because I left LiveJournal when the Russians
bought SixApart, the company that runs LiveJournal. Not that I have
anything against russians, but I’m not a huge fan of my words in that
place, it’s a personal thing. WordPress.org also enables commenting and
stats collection and automatically publicizes on it’s own to Twitter and
Facebook and Tumblr so I don’t have to futz around and create links to
my blog posts after the fact – WordPress does it for me.

Day One stores everything, WordPress stores my public lengthy stories,
Facebook stores my private lengthy stories and Twitter and Facebook
handle the rest – the tiny stuff. It’s all held together by Dropbox,
TextExpander, Day One app, my host, WordPress.org, Twitter, Facebook,
and Tumblr. It seems complicated and it is rather too-involved, but this
way I can write freely without having to concern myself with
self-censorship or exposing the wrong people to the wrong kind of
information. This way it’s all compact and interrelated and convenient.
So far, this is great for me and it’s how I am able to “have my cake and
eat it too”, which I’m a huge fan of in general.

All these products that I mentioned are either cheap or free. Nothing
cost me an arm or a leg, even the host, when you spread the cost over a
whole year is a pittance. I could even help friends and family set up
their own WordPress.org blogs on my host if they, and Scott, agreed. So,
if you think some of this would suit you and Scott’s good with it, just
let me know.

Facebook Notification Autodisplay Trick

Posted on December 21, 2012 by bluedepth

I recently moved over all my old Facebook Notes entries from the past and copied them into my Day One app for posterity. In the wayback machine I found an entry from March 25th, 2009 regarding a neat little thing I found that makes Facebook a little more neat. The entry back then covered how I found a way to make my Firefox browser automatically open up Facebook notifications as new tabs in my browser window all on it’s own. So as people that are connected to me on Facebook do things that fire off notifications, those automatically create new tabs in my browser and I don’t have to worry about playing catch up with the notification system and then overloading my browser with 20+ notifications. As I do other things my browser can tend to Facebook all on it’s own and I can look over the notifications in a more organic and pleasing way. I’ve just found a way to do the same thing on my Chrome browser and for anyone who is interested, here’s how I did it:

1) Start Chrome

2) Find the Chrome Extension RSS Live Links and install it

3) Browse to Facebook and click on your notifications, then find the RSS link and copy that to the clipboard.

4) In the options for RSS Live Links, add the RSS entry to the extensions RSS list and make sure you set the refresh time properly to where you want it and then check “Automatically open new items” checkbox. Click Save.

5) Save the extension options and then you are all set.

The extension will scan the RSS feed from Facebook every five minutes and if it notices changes it will automatically open up those new items as tabs in your Chrome browser. When you are all done, you can minimize your browser and do other things and over the day your browser will automatically fill with all the little notifications that Facebook throws down all on it’s lonesome. Then you go into your browser, see the notifications and then close the tabs (Command-W) when you are done with them. Easy peasy.

Losing Social Context

Posted on June 21, 2012 by bluedepth

I’m an avid user of social networking, picking up stories from Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus. These services all have certain ways to mark some sort of favorite status, liking, favorite’ing a tweet, +1’ing a G+ entry, that sort of thing. On its own it’s effective for those services however I’ve found that it just really isn’t enough for me.

To bridge the gap, between seeing something that piques my interest and remembering it for later used to be served by browser bookmarks, but these are inconvenient because they languish on only one machine and can’t be accessible on every device that I own. I was for a time a user of Delicious, but since it was bought out by Yahoo and then imperiled by Yahoo in a mystery state somewhere between being alive and dead I’ve given up on that as well. Another bookmarking service that I use is Marco Arment’s Instapaper which satisfies a lot of the needs that I have – it works on every device I use and it’s ubiquitous enough to become the tool of choice for me when it comes to a bookmarking service.

There is a problem with Instapaper however. It comes down to context. When I’m on Twitter I see a link from @gadgetfreaks, for example, and I send the link to Instapaper so I can read it later. I prefer the information flow from Twitter to be regular and smooth, dancing from item to item I never really stop to actually browse any of the links presented to me on Twitter unless they are in my “core” group of people who I follow on Twitter. On Twitter it’s really a quick browse with small dwells to retweet, send links to Instapaper, or very rarely browse right from Twitter off a link shared by someone I follow. So, after a while of browsing the stream from Twitter my Instapaper queue becomes weighty and I then use the Instapaper site, the Instapaper app, or “ReadNow” app on my MacBook to go back to the links that I’ve sent to Instapaper to read later, or, read now.

While I’m browsing my Instapaper queue I then run into a crisis, sometimes, and this crisis is one of context. I have an entry in my Instapaper but I have no idea what it is in reference to and there isn’t any convenient way that I can think of to chew backwards through the Twitter stream to rescue the flavor text that was near the link to rescue some semblance of a context. So these links in my Instapaper, without context, are on at least some small way at least browsable, but without the surrounding context the links are more chaff than wheat. So I browse the links, I don’t get why I saved it, and then just dump the link out of Instapaper.

Is it a problem? No, not in any appreciable way. But it would be an interesting expansion on the Instapaper design to have the functionality that sends the link to Instapaper also grab the nearby text from Twitter and have a foldaway area where you can unpack the context and regain it, so the article you saved in Instapaper makes sense.

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